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A year after announcing that the time had come to take action to address our shameful past, the Church of England has yet to set up its promised £100m slave reparations fund.
Last January, the church announced that investments in “communities affected by historic slavery” would “be carried out over a nine-year period starting in 2023.”
However, the church has not yet announced how the fund will work or set a date when the first investments will be made.
A 2022 report found that £10bn of church endowments partially benefited from investments in the 18th century Atlantic slave trade.
“We hope that the new fund will be operational by the end of this year,” the Bishop of Salisbury, the Rev. Stephen Lake, said in a written response to questions submitted to the church’s legislative body, the General Conference.
He added: “We are trying to do the best we can here in a situation that is in every sense beyond repair.”
The church denied it had any plans to start distributing funds in 2023 and told the Telegraph it had rejected “proposals for a deferral”.
“While this work is too important to rush, it is proceeding carefully and as planned in line with our initial announcement,” the spokesperson said.
The £100m amount is just 3 per cent of the £3.6bn that the church committee, which manages the endowment, expects to distribute in total over the next nine years.
A lasting positive legacy
“The goal is for the Impact Investing Fund to grow in perpetuity and establish a lasting positive legacy in the broader community,” Bishop Lake said.
“There is also the potential for other institutions to join, potentially further increasing the size and impact of the fund.”
He added: “We specified this amount knowing that no amount of money would be enough to repair the horrors of the past.”
The independent monitoring group is expected to issue recommendations on the fund’s operation on March 4, after which the fund’s schedule will be “finalized.”
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said when announcing the fund that it aims to “address the mistakes of the past by investing in a better future”.
But reparations activist Esther Stanford-Zosei, who is part of the watchdog group making the recommendations, criticized the move at the time because the size of the £100m fund and how it will be spent will not be decided unilaterally. They are descendants of enslaved people. ”
A spokesperson for the church board said: “The Church Commission’s £100m program of impact investing, grant-making, research and engagement, set up in response to shameful discoveries about historic links to chattel slavery in Africa, remains on track. “And on March 4, an independent monitoring group is expected to issue recommendations on how to deliver that program.” ”
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